When you look at how women change their behaviour according to how much they earn, instead of how many hours of paid work they do, you notice something absolutely fascinating.
Janeen Baxter and Belinda Hewitt, in their 2012 paper ‘Negotiating Domestic Labor: Women’s Earnings and Housework Time in Australia’, analysed information from Australian households harvested by the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey.17 They specifically looked at the pattern of women’s housework plotted against their contribution to the household’s total weekly earnings. They looked at women in couple families only; no one would be surprised to learn that single mothers do all the housework in their homes.
Here’s what they found: on average, women do seventeen minutes less housework a week for every 1 per cent extra they contribute to the household budget. So if a husband earns $99,000 and his wife goes out and gets a casual job that pays $1000, she will lop seventeen minutes off her weekly housework. Another 1 per cent of contribution ensues a further seventeen fewer minutes of work around the house, and so on. This, so far, is a rather beautiful demonstration of bargaining theory. Paid work is exchangeable for unpaid work; if you do more of one, you will do less of the other.
But this pattern holds only until the woman’s contribution reaches 66.6 per cent of total household income. Once she starts earning more than that, she actually starts increasing her amount of unpaid work again.18 Once the woman is firmly established as the family’s main breadwinner, in other words, she starts behaving in exactly the opposite manner from what the bargaining model would predict – as she earns more from paid work, she resumes more and more work around the house.
Now this is quite weird. Why would a woman making a bigger contribution to the paid work in any given household also feel obliged to increase the amount of unpaid work she does at the same time? And why does 66.6 per cent serve as a trigger-point for everything in a household to change? What is it, the Number of the Laundress or something?
‘One explanation is that we have such a strong male breadwinner culture in Australia that in those households women are, if you like, re-asserting their gender identity by picking up some of the housework that’s left over,’ says Baxter.
This strange Australian pattern isn’t just something that popped up in Baxter’s study. It was first discussed in 2003, when a team of Australian and American researchers got together to compare Australian and American patterns of housework division between the sexes. That project – Michael Bittman of the University of New South Wales was the lead Australian researcher involved – also found that Australian couples changed their behaviour markedly when women started out-earning their husbands.19 Bittman and colleagues plotted a graph showing how women behaved as their contribution to the household finances grew; it curved downwards until the women were earning about the same as their husbands, then curved right back up again as their earnings grew. The resultant graph is the shape of a slightly off-centre smile. The Bittman study also plots the contribution of husbands throughout all this; it remains – roughly as we’d expect given the other evidence previously discussed – pretty much a straight line throughout.
The researchers were puzzled. Could they have got it wrong? Could there be something else going on? After all, the number of households in which women out-earned their husbands was not huge; could something be skewing the results? They tried breaking the housework down into constituent elements: cooking, cleaning, and laundry. They tried eliminating households with unemployed husbands. Every way they cut it, the same parabola kept popping up.
American couples were different, interestingly enough. Over there, as wives earned more, they cut back on their housework hours. There wasn’t any weird Number of the Beast reversal for the women, unlike in Australia. What happened instead was that their husbands went on strike. American men increased their rates of housework as their wives earned more, right up to the point at which their earnings were at a par. As their wives outstripped them in terms of income, though, the men then downed tools and decreased their housework again.20
Again, the researchers tried everything they could to explain the differences between what they observed in the US and what they observed in Australia. But, after fiddling about to account for possible differences in research methods and data analysis, they could find nothing that would erase the disparity. It was, they concluded, a genuine cross-national phenomenon. ‘Australian women respond to earning more than their husbands by increasing their housework, as if to make up for the gender deviance of female breadwinning and their husbands’ dependence on this,’ they concluded, while ‘Australian men’s participation in housework is impervious to their wives’ earnings.’21
In Australia, therefore, bargaining as an explanation of housework division only really works until it bumps up against our rather robust set of implicit national assumptions about whose job it is to earn money. I’m going to have a much closer look at this whole area in Chapter 9, ‘Role Reversal’.
So we know that women expand and contract their housework hours according to all sorts of factors, and men’s housework hours stay kind of static. What happens to all that housework that a woman stops doing when she goes into full-time work, if it’s not being picked up by her husband?
This is a pretty significant question. Let’s take a look at the busiest households of all; families with children aged under fifteen. In those households, a stay-at-home mum does an amazing sixty-five hours a week of combined housework and childcare, but she cuts that back to forty-one hours if she goes to work full-time. That’s a whole twenty-four hours, every week, of housework she just stops doing. And her husband doesn’t vary his hours much – he just keeps doing twenty hours a week or so, as per the national unwritten accord.22
What happens to all that cleaning, dusting, and cooking? Who does it? Where does it go?
Well, in some cases, some of it will be outsourced; the family might hire a cleaner, or eat more takeaway food. But in many cases, the work simply doesn’t get done.
One imagines that the houses of these families just end up being grubbier. When women cut back their hours at home, housework is the first thing to go. They hang on to child care for dear life; mothers who increase their paid work hours maintain the same amount of childcare time, usually through cutting back in other areas, like leisure, or sleep.23
If houses just end up being dirtier, is that so much of a problem? Well, it depends who you ask.
New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, in a 2013 essay entitled ‘A Really Easy Answer to the Feminist Housework Problem’, delivered on his headline promise with this simple recommendation: ‘Do less of it.’24 Chait – a home dad – is irritated by the tenor of debate about household division of labour. ‘Viewing housework inequality as entirely a phenomenon of exploitative men free-riding off of female domestic labour makes sense only if you think men derive equal enjoyment from a cleaner and neater home,’ he wrote. ‘The assumption of much of the feminist commentary surrounding household chores assumes that there is a correct level of cleanliness in a heterosexual relationship, and that level is determined by the female. I think a little cultural relativism would improve the debate.’
Chait himself – by way of declaring his stakeholder interest in this matter – disclosed that in college he had lived ‘in a group house with newspapers for carpeting and pizza boxes stacked to the ceiling’. Since marriage, though, he and his wife have settled on a standard: a bit neater than he would keep it, and a bit messier than she’d like.
The Canadian writer Stephen Marche enlarges upon the theme in a recent New York Times piece – rather excitingly entitled ‘The Case for Filth’ – in which he too agitates for grime.25
‘The ancient Romans would have found Renaissance Europeans disgusting beyond belief (as their Muslim contemporaries did) and certainly my grandmother would find my house filthy,’ he argues. ‘The standards have changed. There exists no agreed-upon definition of “what has to be done”
in a household.’
The solution to housework wars is not only clear, but refreshingly easy, in Marche’s view: ‘Housework is perhaps the only political problem in which doing less and not caring are the solution, where apathy is the most progressive and sensible attitude,’ Marche writes. ‘Fifty years ago, it was perfectly normal to iron sheets and to vacuum drapes. They were “necessary” tasks. The solution to the inequality of dusting wasn’t dividing the dusting; it was not doing the dusting at all.’
Part of the problem, in the housework wars, is a definitional one. What is housework? And what is the baseline amount of it that needs to be done in order for a household to function without risk of septicaemia, structural collapse, vermin or juvenile delinquency?
To explore this further, I telephoned John Birmingham, who wrote the bible of share-house filth, the 1994 best-seller He Died with a Felafel in His Hand.
‘This is completely politically incorrect, I know, but I suspect that men just have a much greater tolerance for filth than women do,’ Birmingham says. ‘For example, as I’m talking to you, I’m looking at two full garbage bags leaned like drunken sailors up against the wall in the entry hall of our house. I’ll get around to putting them out sometime today. I’m cool with two giant bags of rubbish blocking the hallway. But I know for a fact that Jane – and most women – would be driven bugshit crazy by those things sitting there all day.’
Birmingham, who works from home, does plenty of housework by average male standards. But he admits that he feels extra heroic when he does it. ‘Jane’s very lucky in that I quite like ironing,’ he says. ‘I can put on my podcasts and work away, but even then, I only iron the easy stuff – shirts and jeans and stuff. She’s got all these complicated lady-lawyer outfits; I don’t go anywhere near that shit. But I’ll do two hours of ironing and I’ll feel – I feel it right down in my meat – as if it’s worth about six months of other stuff.’
The degree of satisfaction after doing a task – or the feeling of martyrdom for having undertaken it at all – is an entirely subjective concept, Birmingham explains: ‘A lot of men tend to define taking the kids down the park to kick the footy around as housework,’ he says. ‘They will see that as exactly as valid as the two hours of laundry that their wife did while they were down there.’
It’s true: the definitions of housework and child care can be naggingly elastic. If I lie on a sofa for half an hour reading a book and my children are nearby building a block tower on the rug, for example, my Time Use Survey diary will quite happily accept that as half an hour of child care, every bit as valid as the half hour I spend sorting out their nit problem or making experiments with food colouring, vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. And in fairness, even though I am quite enjoying the book, I am obliged to be there; I couldn’t just fang off down the pub, for instance, because I am ‘minding’ the children and everyone agrees that children need to be minded.
But what about the jobs that not everyone agrees are actually important? Sometimes, when we’re going to visit friends, I decide we need to take them some home-made biscuits. The time I spend baking those biscuits is time I would probably – if prompted – record as housework. But Jeremy, who never sees the point of taking biscuits and is rarely an enthusiastic co-sponsor of the pre-visit biscuit-baking project, might have a good argument against including such housework in the register at all.
This asymmetry of belief can – in many households – be the source of much ancillary friction. How can an argument be had over fairness when each party has a different idea of what constitutes the necessary work requiring fair division? Is it fair for party A to be annoyed with party B for not doing half of the window-washing, when party B has never even noticed that the windows were dirty and in any event considers any attempt to wash them as at best Pyrrhic and at worst useless?
Smouldering hostilities may thus be established within two camps; party A is pretty much going to be washing the windows, probably in a sullen fug of silence, scented with the whiff of singed martyr. Party B’s prior suspicion that party A is a tiny bit OCD about such matters solidifies – without any need for further discussion – into certainty.
Viewed from space, the world of housework looks pretty clear-cut. Viewed up close, it is a teeming microcosm of unspoken conventions, ancient grievances, and systems of exchange so baroque as to be practically incomprehensible. Here’s one, outlined by Marche in his article:
The mechanism of emptying the dishwasher in my house is typically elaborate. When I cook, my wife tends to be responsible for the dishes. But she hates removing the cutlery from the dishwasher. (To figure out why she hates removing the cutlery would require decades of deep analysis. I do not know.) Therefore emptying the cutlery is my responsibility. So if I unload all the dishes, it’s a gift to my wife, but the cutlery is not. It is my marital duty. Every well-managed household is full of such minor insanities.26
Aha! This introduces a new and Byzantine complication to the calculus. In a world of assumed responsibility, you get credit for doing things that are viewed as additional to your usual beat, but no credit at all for things that are supposed to be your bag anyway. Hence the display of Yuletide wonder and awe when a school dad constructs a wise man outfit from a Starbucks cup and an old footy jumper, compared to the heartfelt round of indifference when a school mum produces actual gold, frankincense and myrrh, plus a donkey in flawless, anatomically correct papier-mâché. This is her job; to fulfil it adequately is more or less unsurprising. But for him to do it at all carries an element of surprise; that it should be done well is barely imaginable.
Patterns of assumption about responsibility aren’t just annoying to the person who is more routinely taken for granted. They are also incredibly important in enforcing forms of behaviour.
Yes, women are more commonly assumed to bear the ultimate responsibility for housework and child care. This should not mean anything to an independently minded couple who live in a bubble. But that generalised assumption (and if you doubt that it exists, have a look at the people who appear in TV advertisements for floor cleaner, toilet cleaner, window cleaner, snap-lock lunch bags, nappies, nappy wipes, baby formula, sliced bread, two-minute noodles – do those people ever have penises?) creates a varying amount of unspoken pressure within a relationship of two otherwise sensible people.
That pressure is due to one reality: if these things are done badly, it is more likely to be seen as the woman’s failure. If a child is not properly cared for, or a house is filthy, the opprobrium for such laxity will be directed at first instance to the woman. This explains why women and men might have differing institutional standards of cleanliness. They have differing amounts of skin in the game.
For a man, the question of how clean a floor needs to be is entirely a matter of personal comfort and utility. For a woman, the judgement is a little more nuanced; her own instincts may be leavened by the knowledge that a dirty house will be viewed as her dirty house, not his. Hence, her standards may be artificially inflated by community standards, or the incredibly clean house belonging to her friend up the road, or indeed the incredibly sparkling surfaces over which impeccably manicured TV mum’s hands linger lovingly après application of Spray n’ Wipe.
Perceptions that child care is ultimately the responsibility of mothers, meanwhile, influences all kinds of behaviour in ways that become obvious the second you start thinking about all this, but are often accepted without comment.
Both fathers and mothers have increased the time they spend in child care across the last few decades. This is mostly because we’ve all read too many parenting books, and are as a society now less inclined to count an afternoon spent with five other kids setting fire to things down the local tip as acceptable for a nine-year-old. More is expected of parents on both sides now.
But mothers and fathers do different types of child care. Mothers are more likely to do the bits that aren’t flexible time-wise: the school run, for instance, or the child-care drop-off and pick
up. Breakfast, dinner, bath-time, getting dressed, school lunches; these are all very typical mum jobs, whereas dad jobs are much more likely to include things like play-time, reading stories, sports and so on.
Because raising children is by definition a bewildering exercise, these divisions may be difficult to spot in your average home, where every day is a scramble. But the University of New South Wales professor Lyn Craig, who has spent many years looking at the way Australian parents manage raising children, has established some clear patterns.
One of the significant differences between the child care that women do and the child care than men do is that the woman is much, much more likely to be alone with her child for more of the time. When Craig and a colleague undertook a comparative study in 2011 of Australian parents with Italian, Danish and French parents, one of the most obvious distinctions, across all countries, was that mothers did a lot more by themselves.27
In their benchmark Australian family (two parents, working dad, no university qualifications, one child aged under four), the mother did eighteen times as much solo care as her husband, who was alone with his children very rarely.28 The child care a woman does is more likely to enable her spouse to go out and do other things. But her husband’s child care is overwhelmingly likely to be done while she’s still there.
This doesn’t mean that the stuff dads do is worthless, or that it’s irrelevant; of course not. What it does mean, though, is that while ‘shared parenting’ is an extremely popular concept, the detail as to who does exactly what – and when – can still add up to a fairly restrictive arrangement.
A few years ago, a colleague of mine was overheard at work telling his buddies: ‘Sorry, can’t make the pub tonight. I’m babysitting!’ A female workmate chimed in, dryly: ‘Mate. You do know that it’s not babysitting if it’s your own kid, right?’ And that’s correct. It’s not babysitting if it’s your own kid. But the way women and men look after children in Australia absolutely reinforces the idea that it’s mothers who are responsible for looking after children, and fathers who are helpers.
The Wife Drought Page 11